The dot com boom of the late 90’s peaked with the acquisition of Time Warner by AOL. Will the social networking peak be AOL’s purchase of Bebo?

AOL paid $850 million for Bebo, which makes News Corp’s purchase of MySpace for only $580 million one of the all-time great deals. For their $850 million AOL gets a site whose total revenues last year were $20 million! To top ot off Bebo led all social networks with 12 hours and 28 minutes of down time since the beginning of 2008 according to ValleyWag.

Hitwise has the following stats about Bebo:

* Bebo ranked 4th among a custom category of 55 social networks, after MySpace, Facebook and MyYearbook for Feb-08 receiving 1.15% of all U.S. visits to the category.
* MySpace’s share of U.S. Internet visits was 67 times larger compared with Bebo and Facebook’s share of US Internet visits (among all categories) was 11x that of Bebo in Feb-08.
* Bebo’s share of U.S. Internet visits is down year on year. Share of U.S. Internet visits (among All Categories) to Bebo were down 23% last week and down 22% in Feb-08.
* The average time spent on Bebo in Feb-08, was 30 minutes and 26 seconds, more than both MySpace (30m7s) and Facebook (21m0s). The average time spent on the site is flat year-over-year, MySpace is slightly down and Facebook is up 69%.
* 22.15% of U.S. visits to Bebo last week came from MySpace last week.

So yes I realize Bebo is a huge social network outside of the U.S. But its US presence is so small that I cannot see how AOL CEO Randy Falco can claim that this purchase “puts us squarely in a leading position in social media at a time when it’s growing at a fantastic rate.” To me, this purchase is a massive overspend on a second tier social network (Bebo) by a company that is fast becoming irrelevant (AOL).

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